Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John
play, a part in his life, including L.J. Cadbury, Carr-Saunders, Grant-Duff, the demographer David Glass, and the eminent biologist Julian Huxley.4 But we now turn to his more public work on the Society’s behalf, starting with his temporary editorship of Eugenics Review. This began in autumn 1941, with Titmuss taking over for the editions of January and April 1942.5 Finding someone to take on this sort of onerous task in wartime would have been problematical for any organisation, so that he stepped forward is indicative of Titmuss’s commitment to the Eugenics Society. It was not, after all, as if he had nothing else to do.
Titmuss used his editorial platform to revisit some of his preoccupations. In the January edition, for instance, he noted the startling decline in the German birth rate, claiming that such a ‘large decrease can hardly be interpreted by the Nazis as an encouraging feature’. It was a ‘vote of No Confidence’ in the regime, its various exhortations to the German population to reproduce notwithstanding. He also noted that the Eugenics Society, and he might also have cited himself here, had consistently argued for better quality data on British population trends, and that ‘after a stern battle with the powers of obscurantism’ the Population (Statistics) Act had been passed in 1938. The war had, without due cause, delayed the publication of up-to-date material. Citing the recent work by the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal, Titmuss continued that Britain would soon be ‘faced with a population crisis’ and the sooner ‘adequate statistics on current fertility patterns and other factors’ were provided, the sooner a ‘eugenic approach to the problem of man’s continuing refusal to reproduce’ could be formulated.6
In the April edition, meanwhile, Titmuss noted the limited publication of the Registrar General’s review of 1938, a year which for ‘students of population’ marked ‘the end of an epoch’. It was the last ‘in which the forces of life and death were undisturbed by war’, and the first since 1911 when comprehensive data became available for the analysis of fertility by way of the 1938 Act. Titmuss then gave a summary of this material while referring readers to his own article in the same edition, discussed later. The other issue with which this engaged was, in the wake of a memorandum produced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, family allowances. This was primarily a technical document to do with costings, giving no sense of whether or not the government was inclined to introduce such a measure. Without attributing the quote of which he clearly approved, Titmuss finished with the view of ‘one commentator’: that ‘the food, the clothing, the cots, the nursery accommodation represented by this or that sum of money socially desirable – and who doubts that they are – the millions given to the families is simply facilitating the distribution of the socially desirable goods to the people socially most eligible for them’.7
Titmuss also contributed to Eugenics Review as an author, for example with an important article, ‘Eugenics and Poverty’, co-written with François Lafitte and published in January 1942. This was partly concerned with the impact of the socioeconomic environment on individual and collective health, an approach central to social medicine. However, it also had more general, but equally important, things to say about eugenics, its philosophical underpinnings, and its aspirations. For Titmuss and Lafitte, eugenics was the ‘use of scientific means to attain an ethical end’, the latter being a ‘higher level of mental and physical health’ and ‘an increase in the biological efficiency of human beings’. ‘Eugenists [sic]’ sought a ‘higher level of health – ie of “wholeness”’ as an end in itself for ‘the human personality is an end in itself’, and because they wished to see ‘human beings in the mass become more completely human’. The Nazis, by contrast, were interested in human health, and biological efficiency, ‘only to the extent that they further the immoral purposes of a tyranny whose highest aim is total warfare’. An individual’s genetic endowment, moreover, did not of itself ‘suffice to produce “whole” human beings’. Even those with a good genetic inheritance required a ‘healthy environment’. This embraced factors such as economic opportunities and the ‘psychological and moral atmosphere’. Only then could an individual attain the ‘full mental and physical stature of a “whole” adult’ potentially available to all human beings. Crucially, though, so entangled were the ‘factors of “nature” and “nurture” of which each human being is the end-product’, and so ‘scanty still’ was knowledge of human genetics, ‘that no eugenist can afford to neglect the study of environmental factors – especially of social and economic conditions’. The authors examined the evidence of various social and health surveys. They concluded that while on one level social progress had taken place, the poorest in society were ‘relatively worse off to-day than forty years ago’. The ‘flight from parenthood’, and its implications for the size and structure of future populations, were likewise noted.8 All these were ideas which Titmuss had been propagating since the 1930s.
Three particular points stand out here. First, the notion that eugenicists should take account of environmental factors was provocative, for this was exactly what the movement’s conservatives had argued against from the outset. That they still had influence was indicated by, for example, the Eugenics Society’s debate over the Beveridge Report. Here, Titmuss took other speakers to task for focusing on a tiny minority of the population, the so-called ‘social problem group’, and neglecting the bulk of the population who would benefit by Beveridge’s proposals.9 Titmuss and Lafitte must therefore be seen as part of what Bland and Hall describe as an influential grouping within the Society, ‘growing throughout the 1930s under Blacker’s tenure as general secretary’, which constituted a ‘liberal/leftist progressive tendency’. This group saw eugenics as part of a ‘wider vision of a scientific approach to the management of society as a whole’.10 It is, in this context, likewise notable that Titmuss and Lafitte emphasised the moral underpinnings of their ideas.
Second, the emphasis on the ‘whole’ and ‘wholeness’ deserves comment, given its prominence in the article. It further reflects Titmuss’s adherence to a holistic, organic view of society which we have encountered on various occasions. The sort of holistic standpoint which Titmuss and Lafitte expressed was thus another example of the participation by such social commentators in a broader intellectual movement seeking to critique the perceived problems of modernity. For those on the progressive left, organic metaphors might be employed to ‘focus on self-regulating equilibrium and solidarity’ among society’s constituent parts in order to ‘justify gradualism and piecemeal government interventions in social life’.11 As we saw in the last chapter, the wartime ‘solidarity’ of the British people was central to Problems of Social Policy, and to Titmuss’s aspirations for post-war society.
Third, there is the point about ‘total warfare’. By the time of the article’s publication, Britain had seen off the initial German threat. More than this, though, the Nazi regime had a few months earlier launched its assault on the Soviet Union, and the barbarity of the war on the Eastern Front was already evident. Small wonder that Titmuss and Lafitte distinguished sharply between what they meant by ‘eugenics’ and the immorality of the Nazi regime. Even more recently, Japan had attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, followed by its successful assault on the British base at Singapore. So the war spread to the Far East, with Hitler making the conflict truly global by declaring war on America.
Titmuss also wrote more specifically on population issues. In an April 1942 piece on the birth rate, he concluded that underneath the existing data there was a ‘serious and continuous fall in reproduction’, and that the ‘loss in unborn casualties to the end of 1941 exceeds by 100 per cent the number of civilians killed by enemy action from the air’.12